This website is dedicated to providing public information regarding DePuy Hip recall and other related information to the recall. None of the information on this site is intended to be formal legal or medical advice, nor should any information on this site be construed as advice that should be used in lieu of information from your attorney or physician.

Monday, August 6, 2012

Update on Connie's Condition: Trials and tribulations of a complex hip case and its potential relationship to the reccurence of cancer

Hello fellow blog readers. Thanks for the notes inquiring on how I am doing.

For those of you who are new to the blog, I was in remission after having had renal cell carcinoma. They said I was "cured" due to the kidney which was removed. My scans were all clean. No tumors. In November of last year, I had a revision and in December, I had numerous tumors which metastasized throughout my body.

The issue at the time was to determine whether there was a link between the Hip revision and the cancer recurrence. After seeing 5 specialists, I think most of us agree that there is a strong possibility the extensive inflammation caused by the revision lowered the ability of my immune system to deal with the suppression of any remaining cancer. Likely cancer never goes away. It may not show its face for a long time but clearly, many things can prompt the recurrence of cells that are just "hanging out".

With respect to the hip revision, it was the oxidative stress , a well documented occurrence with hip revisions which we belive may have been the precipitant in the cancer reoccurance. If you would like to read more about this, just type in oxidative stress and or redox into the search at the top of the page and it will bring up all of the links related to this. You can read about it quickly here: http://www.mydepuyhiprecall.com/2012/05/great-pictorial-to-illustrate-metal-on.html (this is a 5 part series.)

I had my scans done a few weeks ago to detect growth or lack thereof with the tumors and there was minimal growth of all of the tumors. So I finally have a plan.

1. I will partake in a "no drug" trial at one of the major cancer institutions for continued monitoring for at least another 3 months until the next set of scans are done.

2. In the interim, I intend to use some very high dose Vit C treatments to address the oxidative stress. Potentially IV vit c combine with lipoic acid.

3. Around November or so, I will become an in-patient to receive Interleuken 2 in an ICU unit in the only attempt I can take at this point to cure the cancer. This particular type of cancer is not able to be treated by traditional chemo and radiation. There is no cure for it other than the IL2 treatment. While the cure rate is low (7% range) there is chance we can boost that rate with a drug which is used in conjunction with IL2 called Entinostat. Its the best and likely only chance I have to get rid of this disease if in fact there is such a thing as completely ridding oneself of cancer. Generally with cancer, you are deemed to be "cured" if you have no recurrance after 5 years. I was in year 6 when I had the revision.

I have learned some really interesting things over this ordeal and if you'd like, I can continue to share these things with you as in many of the minds of the physcians, the hip revision and the reccurance are linked. Not all phycians on my team though.